Damn, the ghost train took a slightly roundabout route when I hit the first power pill, and it’s probably going to cost me two seconds. Retry.

Not close enough to 1,000,000 points by the two-minute mark. Retry.

This is what my life has become: dots, dots, and more dots. It turns out that I’m some sort of Pac-Rain-Man, and I’ve spent what probably amounts to 30 hours (thus far) gunning for nothing shy of perfection. My six-hour-a-day play sessions have paid off so far; I’m currently #91 on the Xbox Live leaderboards, with a whopping 1,947,500 points — almost within reach of the 2,141,300 top score. And all this just applies to the first map, aptly titled Championship II. I haven’t even started taking the other eight maps seriously yet.

I suspect that a lot of people have passed on Pac-Man Championship Edition DX, falsely assuming it’s just a dolled-up version of 2007′s Pac-Man Championship Edition (itself a dolled-up version of 1980′s Pac-Man). But it’s so much more: DX takes the classic maze-game to new echelons of addictive problem-solving, and it’s an obsessive-compulsive player’s alternating dream/nightmare game. Everyone knows Pac-Man eats dots, that ghosts chase him, and that he eats power pills to turn the tables on said ghosts. But in addition to contending with the ethereal Blinky, Pinky, Inky, and Clyde, Pac-Man awakens scads of snoozing specters on his merry munching spree, resulting in a conga line of rainbow-colored monsters tailing him all the way to that next power pill. So the goal is twofold: eat everything in sight, and rack up the biggest ghost train possible (also for eating). It’s still Pac-Man, but it’s a very different kind of Pac-Man.

Fast fingers and split-second decision-making, always the hallmarks of smart Pac-Man play, are the keys to excelling, particularly when things go down to the wire. DX’s marquee mode — a five-minute score attack (incidentally, the only one that features leaderboard replays) — is a microcosm compared to the original arcade game’s 256-board marathon (kill screen and all), yet the potential for perfect play is still here, and still an insanely lofty goal. The requisite 1,000,000 points (or 2,000,000 in 10-minute score attack mode) might keep the average achievement-wrangler busy for all of 45 minutes, but this game was built with super-competitive savants in mind. Even the most pinpoint-accurate human reflexes don’t guarantee 100% consistent A.I. behavior from game to game… and when things reach breakneck speeds (roughly the three-minute mark, if you’re curious), and you’re forced to use the slow-mo ghost avoidance feature and score-screwing bombs to avoid fatal binds, he who plays the best game of Pac-Man speed chess wins.

Though I still don’t know what a perfect game of DX looks like, the fact that I’m still glued to it (despite — at this point — finishing what I estimate to be maybe one actual five-minute game in any given hour) should give you a pretty clear idea of how I feel about it.